The American Spectator

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Books in Review

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Several selections in the collection were signed by Wlady Pleszczynski or Andrew Ferguson, one of the finest conservative stylists writing today. But neither quite captures the Tyrrell voice. Louis Hatchett, in his fine and perceptive introduction to the collection, also gives it a good shot, and there are no doubt unseen hands at work in some of the other sections. But the Tyrrell touch is unique. Apart from style and his leading role as a conservative smiter of the liberal ungodly, Tyrrell has also played a practical role in shaping and defining the conservative movement. During the Reagan ascendancy, it seemed that the civil war, raging through the ’60s and sputtering through the ’70s, had finally been won. Conservative ranks had swelled, and Bill Buckley invited Democrat war-hawks, old Scoop Jackson supporters, former Trotskyists—all those people we now call neocons—to come on in, the water’s fine. And in they came, with both feet, bringing their sons and daughters with them.

If, as James Burnham once described it, National Review was “Miss [Priscilla] Buckley’s finishing school for young ladies and gentlemen of conservative persuasion,” TAS became the literary boot camp for neocon offspring, the place where they first made their writing debuts. Before the neocon baby boom, there were splendid writers like George Will, making his bones in TAS with his “Letter from a Whig.” But most impressive was the profusion of young neocons, and today the mastheads of the nation’s most successful conservative publications are stocked with graduates from Tyrrell’s boot camp—graduates who learned to swim at TAS and owe Tyrrell a profound debt of gratitude.

Tyrrell, like Frank Meyer, apparently believed it possible to build a movement by bringing all the strands of conservative thought and ideology together. And during the Reagan years, the idea of a conservative fusion seemed to have become reality. Then came the first Bush pause, followed by the Clinton years and what seemed to be the unraveling of the conservative coalition. True, in the mid-’90s the balance briefly tipped back. The elections of 1994 brought a new breed of young congressmen to Washington—the social and cultural heirs of the 1960s conservative counterrevolution, spearheaded by publications like The American Spectator and National Review. They blundered into an ambush disguised as a budget battle, however, allowing the Clinton administration to survive.

And in the meantime, the counterculture had taken on a life of its own, successfully moving from the campus to the White House, and in the process establishing itself in the bureaucracy, the agencies of government, and most of the major media. And when Tyrrell took on the Clintons, head-to-head, there was a massive counterattack. As he later wrote, “They [the Clintons] were holy people. They fought the Vietnam War, the imperial presidency, racism. They could do no wrong.” Tyrrell got the goods on the Clintons. But the Clintons had the backing of the media stars, many of them products of the ’60s. And when Tyrrell fired his broadsides in a TAS exposé, the White House came at Tyrrell with all they had, unloosing a propaganda barrage which, as James Warren pointed out in the Chicago Tribune, “seemed to be largely embraced by official Wash ing ton and its solicitous press corps.”

Since those days, the moving vans have come and gone, but to and from the White House, not TAS headquarters, carrying “the Groper,” as Tyrrell affectionately calls Bill Clinton, and his bride to greener, and in the case of the Groper, much more lucrative pastures. (And we’re still waiting for the post-presidential conflict of interest investigations.) The second Bush pause has come and gone, leaving in its wake a lingering sense of awe and bafflement, to be succeeded by an administration run by a strange new figure, who could have been created by a mad sociologist in a lab at Harvard, and who just may be the beau ideal of the old counterculture, the embodiment of everything Bettina Aptheker, Mark Rudd, Bernardine Dohrn, and her consort Bill Ayers (both of them now holding high positions in the Chicago educationist establishment) had ever blown up buildings for.

But maybe not. At this writing, especially in his various pronouncements on defense and foreign policy, the Chosen One sounds decidedly more like Dick Cheney than, say, Nancy Pelosi, and there’s an uneasiness rippling through leftist ranks. Could the One actually become the Other? Unlikely, no doubt. But stay tuned. If and when it begins to happen, we’ll read about it in Bob Tyrrell’s Continuing Crisis.